


half a pack of cigarettes

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Sagas of Sundry: Madness
Genre: Dread, Dystopia, F/M, Horror, Yuletide 2018, cosmic horror, snakebite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 04:01:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17036252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: “There's ten miles to Castle Town, we've got a mouthful of bourbon, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark out, and we're lacking sunglasses.”Abigail laughs, and for a few minutes they fuck up a bunch more movie quotes before that gets boring and they go back to walking in silence.Abigail and Jude try to escape the desert.





	half a pack of cigarettes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaresu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/gifts).



> Dear amaresu, Happy Yuletide! I hope you enjoy this!
> 
> Thank you [redacted] for the beta. If you see something that seems like a Stephen King or T.S. Eliot reference in here, it probably is.
> 
> * * *

The desert gets cold at night, so it’s lucky they still have Jude’s lighter. Half a pack of cigarettes won’t last long. Nor will the miniscule slosh of liquor in Abigail’s flask. That’s okay. When the sun rises again they’re going to have to face either an endless trek in an aimless direction to try to find something else, or go back to the tower. What’s left of the tower. It’s a shattered heap of rock now, weathered gray stone held together by sheer chance more than design.

It seems impossible that they were spat back out of it like so much flotsam onto this oceanless beach, and yet here they are.

The rough grass Abigail pulls up a clump at a time burns brightly, avidly consuming the smaller branches crisscrossed over it, before settling down to chew contemplatively at the larger chunks of wood.

Jude takes his jacket off, puts it around Abigail’s shoulders. She’s too exhausted to argue. They barely speak as they pass one treasured cigarette back and forth, smoking it down to the filter, and finally flicking the filter into the fire when it becomes apparent that there’s not a shred of tobacco left clinging to it.

They lie down together, Jude’s arms around Abigail, the alkaline dust of the desert floor puffing up around them before settling again. Jude sneezes and Abigail automatically murmurs, “Bless you.”

“I think we’re past that point,” Jude says.

Three moons rose when night settled across this strange barren land; they’ve avoided looking up ever since, afraid of what might stare back at them if they do.

Sleep seems unlikely, but comes anyway.

* * *

“Jordan! _Jordan_!”

Abigail rolls over in Jude’s arms, presses her forehead to his, and then pinches his earlobe to wake him up. His eyes snap open and for a second all Abigail sees is void. She recoils, but then Jude blinks and it’s just his eyes, wide and startled but _eyes_.

“Wha’?” he mumbles.

“You were having a nightmare.”

“I’m not sure being awake is an improvement.”

He has a point.

* * *

Something that passes for morning arrives. The light gets brighter and it’s fucking hot even though the sun has only just risen. The sky is still objectionably purple. All in all, another morning in a fucked-up dimension.

Breakfast is another shared cigarette. In the daylight Abigail can see that there are clusters of red berries at the base of the grass tufts she was using as kindling last night. She picks one, bursts it between her fingers, and sniffs the orangish residue.

“I wouldn’t,” Jude says.

“Why? Poison?” She shrugs out of his jacket and hands it back to him; Jude folds it and tucks it under his arm. “That might wind up being a good option.”

“Poison doesn’t mean you die fast. You want to find out what shitting yourself to death in the middle of some alien desert feels like?”

“And they say romance is dead,” Abigail says, starting toward the remnants of the tower.

They’re still maybe a hundred feet away when the giant chunks of stone begin to stir. One by one they lift up, turn in the air, and are placed back where they belong, each with a low boom that shakes the earth.

“Jesus,” Abigail says, stopping dead still.

“It’s like if Ozymandias stood up,” Jude says, reaching for the cigarettes, touching the packet like a talisman, and then letting his hand drop back to his side.

“Can you see what’s moving them?”

“No, can you?”

Abigail shakes her head. “I’m going to go closer.”

The first step is the hardest, putting one foot in front of the other, especially with Jude making a negatory sound. But Abigail presses on. Ninety feet. Eighty. Seventy. Sixty.

Fifty feet away is close enough to see—or rather, not see—what’s moving the stone blocks. At first it _seems_ like nothing at all, but what Abigail can see from this new vantage point both explains everything and has her turning tail and fleeing back to Jude.

As each solid block is lifted, the softest of indentations appears in it, as though it is being gripped between a colossal, invisible finger and thumb.

Abigail chugs the last shot-worth of liquor from her flask, sticking the now-empty piece of home back in her pocket before succinctly explaining to Jude, “We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

Jude, looking past her, doesn’t need her to expound upon this as they start walking in the opposite direction, but Abigail does anyway, and they both walk a little faster at the thought of what such giant invisible hands could do to anything smaller and more vulnerable than a stone block.

* * *

Walking in the daytime and resting at night is the worst possible idea. Jude’s watch no longer reflects real time, but it still tells them that only two hours pass before the heat becomes unbearable. Both of them are squinting against the shimmering haze that rises from the desert floor. The soft booming of the massive edifice being rebuilt block by block behind them has faded to a sound like distant thunder.

“Do you think it ever rains here?” Abigail says.

“I don’t think it does anything here.” Jude wipes sweat from his brow. “This doesn’t feel like a place. It just feels like somewhere in between places.”

He could be rambling thanks to the heat, but Abigail thinks he’s right. They came through a door that shouldn’t have opened onto this desert, and the Tower—which has gained proper noun status in her mind—offered them more than one exit in its own way.

She wonders if Emmett, somehow, found Fenly in the void.

She wonders if Selina truly did make it home.

Then she gives up wondering about the people who are now just abstract concepts and turns her attention back to her own situation. Her boots feel hot and heavy. Her legs feel hot and heavy. Her tongue feels hot and heavy. There’s no readily apparent way to remedy any of this, so she keeps trudging in an approximately straight line, weaving to avoid the bigger clumps of tangled grass or the occasional unhappy-looking bush. Some of the bushes have small yellow flowers on them in defiance of the endless arid expanse around them. Here and there red rock piles stick up from the desert floor like jagged rotting teeth.

“Maybe we should’ve jumped,” Jude says. “Maybe we would’ve gone through one of those other gaps.”

“Maybe we would’ve wound up in Candyland.”

“Do you have to be so sarcastic?”

Abigail presses her fingernails into her palms and stays silent. She is listening for anything that isn’t Jude or the resurrection of the Tower.

* * *

At noon Jude calls a halt. Sweat’s pouring down both their faces now, but Abigail doesn’t want to take her sweater off, well aware that she’ll burn to a crisp without its protection.

There’s a big enough jumble of rocks nearby for them to hunker down in a meager scrap of shade, disturbing a slumbering lizard. Before it can dart away Abigail catches it, cracking its head smartly open against the rock.

“You can’t be serious,” Jude says as Abigail takes out her knife, slitting the creature’s belly open and tugging out its guts.

“I don’t see any delis around here.”

“But raw?”

“Christ. We’ll have another fire and cook it tonight. We’ll need the fuel to keep going.”

“Wherever the fuck it is we _are_ going.” Jude looks up at the sky and adjusts his watch, though it’s anyone’s guess whether this place runs on anything even remotely resembling Earth time.

Abigail scratches a hole in the sand a few yards away to bury the entrails, and leaves the corpse hanging as high up in a nearby bush as she can manage, doing her best to wind the branches around it; she doesn’t want anything stealing their meat.

When she gets back to the rocks Jude’s asleep, head on his jacket. She curls into a ball tight against the stone and the heat pulls any wakefulness from her body.

* * *

She wakes up, shivering, to the sound of a crackling fire and the smell of roasting flesh. Her stomach growls and she quickly rolls clear of the rocks before sitting up and stretching. Her face stings; she’s caught some sun, rock shelter or no rock shelter.

“Guess it smells pretty damn good,” Jude says, and for a second he’s just darkness flashing a pearly white smile.

“Worth shitting yourself to death over?” She cocks an eyebrow at him.

“At this point? Yeah.”

He’s got the lizard spitted on a branch that he’s shoved through the hole where its head used to be. Hopefully he buried the head or threw it far away; though they went untouched last night, Abigail doesn’t know what might come out in the desert in the dark.

The meat is unremarkable, but they both feel better for having eaten _something_. They share a cigarette, kick sand onto the fire, and start walking by the eerie triple-moon-light.

Abigail looks back just once to see how far they’ve come. The Tower stands, a single mocking middle finger of stone, a shadow against the darkness. Abigail flips it the bird right back and keeps walking.

At least she can’t _hear_ it any more.

* * *

Walking in the cool moonlight is physically easier but mentally eerier. Nothing can hide under a stark noon sun. Now, the shadows encroach on their minds as well as the ground around them.

Jude, five paces to Abigail’s right, stops suddenly. “ _Fuck_.”

“What?”

But she can see what, even if he missed noticing it until impact: a shin-high post sticking up from the ground, weathered and old but with the comforting rounded shape of something made with purpose.

“Wish I had a flashlight,” Jude grumbles, squatting to examine the post. He sparks his lighter and turns the flame up, squinting. “C’mere... can you read this?”

Abigail kneels beside him and squints. There’s a metal plate atop the post—and thank God it’s as rounded off as the post itself, or Jude would have a nasty gash instead of a bruise—and when she rubs away the desert dust she can read the words **Castle Town 10**.

“Ten _what_?” Jude wonders.

“Whatever it is, let’s try to cover as many of them as we can tonight. Is your leg okay?”

Jude gives her a tight-lipped smile. “I’ll survive.” The smile spreads a little. “There’s ten miles to Castle Town, we’ve got a mouthful of bourbon, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re lacking sunglasses.”

Abigail laughs, and for a few minutes they fuck up a bunch more movie quotes before that gets boring and they go back to walking in silence.

They see the next post because now they’re _looking_ , the knowledge that one might exist fueling the drive to peer at low bushes and stumpy cacti to see if they might be masking another sign that something else exists in this wasteland.

This one says **Castle Town 8**.

“Did we miss nine?” Jude pats the post lovingly.

“Who gives a fuck? The number’s going down and we’re staying on course. How’s your leg?”

“Aches, but I’m not stopping.”

Abigail grins and gives him a dry kiss on the cheek. “That’s my man.”

* * *

The last waypost they find as the sun is rising is **Castle Town 2**.

“Bullshit it’s two miles,” Jude says, but he still gives the post what has now become a ritual grateful pat. “We’d be able to see a town from two miles out.”

“So maybe they’re not miles. How long did we walk last night?”

Jude checks his watch. “This says six hours.”

“Yeah, so it ever take you that long to walk eight miles?”

“Only when I was totally wasted.” Jude gives her a rueful little smile. “But I guess dehydrated as fuck counts too.”

“Do you think any of these shitty little cactuses has water in it?” Abigail pulls her sweater off and wraps it around one hand.

“What’re you gonna do, saw one open with your pocketknife?”

“Nope.”

Punching the shit out of a cactus turns out to be _very_ cathartic.

“Whoa!” Jude scrambles to catch the top bulb as it pops off, pulling his sleeves down over his hands just in time. He almost drops it but then juggles it so that the broken part, oozing some kind of liquid, is at the top.

“Is it—can we drink it?” In the sullen red sunrise light, the liquid gleams promisingly. Abigail feels her mouth muster the tiniest bit of saliva in response. If it’s poison, it is oh so pretty.

“Do you want to try?”

Abigail opens her mouth and lets him tilt the chunk of spiky plant over it.

The liquid dribbles more than drips and she thinks it might be sap rather than water. But it’s wet on her tongue and lips, and it cuts through the bitter dusty taste in her mouth. Like the lizard, it doesn’t taste particularly interesting, although it does remind her that vegetables are the next thing she’s going to miss if they’re out here much longer.

Jude tips the plant over his own mouth. Abigail watches for a moment as the thick liquid drools into his mouth, and then starts looking for another cactus to punch.

* * *

The sun is still only just setting when they get up that night, and when Abigail walks back to the **Castle Town 2** post to make sure they’re still heading in more or less the right direction, she notices something on the metal plate that she didn’t see last night: a crude etching of a bear.

“That better not be a warning,” Jude says, balancing another cactus bulb between jacket-covered hands.

Abigail lets him pour the liquid carefully into her mouth and swallows three thick mouthfuls. “What the fuck would bears eat out here? Rocks?”

Jude shrugs. “I was— _Abby, watch out_!”

Abigail looks down a moment too late and sees the diamond scales, hears the rattle, and then feels the fangs puncture the leather of her boot.

“ _No you fucking don’t_!” she yells, and she grabs the rattlesnake by the tail, cracking it like a whip against the signpost. Her foot is crying out in pain already, and it looks like she snapped one of the fucker’s fangs off in her boot, but when the blood flies more of it’s the snake’s than her own.

“Abigail, stop, it’s dead,” Jude says, grabbing her wrist, and she realizes she’s whipped it so many times that its head is basically pulp, scales and flesh torn off to reveal bone. He looks down at her foot. “And don’t move.”

“What?”

“Don’t. Move.” He takes a knee beside her and grasps the fang stuck in the leather about halfway along its length. Peering down past his bent head, Abigail sees that not only did she actually tear the fang clean out of the snake’s jaw, the venom sac is still attached—and full.

Jude eases it out slowly; Abigail can feel it leaving her flesh and holds her breath until it’s clear.

“Well,” Jude says. “I guess I have two extra teeth now.”

Funny. She’d completely forgotten the one he’s wearing around his neck. But it’s still there, just tucked under his shirt.

“Throw it away,” she says, voice wavering.

“Abigail. We could use this. If it comes down to it.”

She thinks _pain_ , _swelling_ , _bleeding_ and then jumps straight ahead to _necrosis_ , _paralysis_ , _coma_.

She’d rather shit herself to death than lie here paralyzed while ants eat her alive.

“Throw it away.”

Jude throws it away.

Her foot’s still in agony, but Abigail lifts the snake up until she’s face to face with it. She flayed it pretty fucking well, and that means she can see where the second venom sac still resides in its skull, plump and full. And she can see how the venom has crystallized at the base of the tooth, preventing it from pumping out.

She has no idea if that’s normal or not, but she’s _very_ grateful.

“You should take the boot off and treat it,” Jude says while Abigail’s scraping scales off flesh with her pocketknife.

“There’s no alcohol left, and I’m not putting cactus juice on it. Besides, if I take the boot off and my foot swells up, I’ll never get the boot back on.

“That’s fair,” Jude concedes, and he gets the fire going with generous handfuls of the tough grass overlaid with branches from the low bushes. It’s smokier than their previous fires. “I think this wood might be greener than before.”

“Maybe we’re closer to a water source,” Abigail says, shaking scales off her hand. She’s impressed by anyone who’s ever had the patience to make a snakeskin belt; this is bullshit, but it’s bullshit that’s going to get them breakfast.

Turns out it takes a while to gut and debone a snake, and the meat’s tougher than the lizard, but they each get more than a few mouthfuls off it, which is more than fair considering it got a solid mouthful of Abigail’s boot and her foot still hurts like a motherfucker.

Staring into the fire as she chews, Abigail has to wonder if she did get a little venom in her system after all. There seem to be flowers in the flames; she thinks they’re roses, though, not the little yellow things that actually grow on the bushes of the area, but red rambling roses. She extends one hand toward them.

Jude grabs her wrist for the second time that night. “Are you crazy? You’ll burn yourself!”

“Well, shit,” Abigail says. “How are we going for smokes?”

Jude examines the packet. “Nine left. You think Castle Town has a 7-Eleven?”

All joking aside, they treat themselves to a full cigarette each. The nicotine buzz hits Abigail hard, but she tosses the butt into the fire and scuffs sand over it more or less with ease.

“Castle Town, here we come,” Jude says.

* * *

It’s deserted.

There’s no 7-Eleven, no Walmart, no Costco, and no _people_. There’s only empty haunted houses and the ghostly whine of the wind.

Jude kicks a rock and then throws it through one of the windows, shattering the glass.

“Don’t do that,” Abigail says. She’s down on one knee loosening her bootlaces. Her boot feels like it’s full of blood. She is not going to confirm this.

“Why the fuck not? Nobody’s here.”

“Yeah, well, if they’re hiding from us because we’re strangers and we start breaking their shit, they’re not going to be happy.”

Jude’s lips tighten and he walks ahead of her, but at least he doesn’t kick anything else.

There’s a howl from somewhere outside of town, the first animal sound they’ve heard since leaving the Tower (she doesn’t count the rattlesnake), and he’s quick to stop and wait for her, hooking his arm through hers.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“I hope whatever that is doesn’t eat people.”

“I hope it’s edible.”

The street they’re walking down, clearly a main street, opens out into a town square. Abigail would call it a village green if it weren’t utterly devoid of life. Featureless sandy dust surrounds a strange round stone structure in the center, and two rectangles like doorframes flank it, but that’s all.

Jude lets out a strangled sound and takes off running.

“ _Jude_!”

“ _Well_!” he yells back, and Abigail launches into her own best limping sprint. Even so, by the time she’s caught up he’s already pulled up the first bucketful of water, and he dumps it over his head without even taking his shirt off. It smells like copper and like mildew, and Abigail strips as fast as she can, standing in just her underwear for him to pour the bucket over her head next. The water’s warm, mostly clear, and she sticks her tongue out to taste it as it runs down her face.

It tastes like it smells, but she doesn’t care.

As well as the bucket there’s a small tin cup on the rim of the well. Jude pulls up a third bucketful and dips the cup into it, holding it out to her first. Abigail drinks in sips, not wanting to vomit herself right back into dehydration by overdoing it, but God it’s hard. Jude doesn’t say anything but just grins at her the whole time.

The animal out past the edge of town howls again.

“That don’t sound right,” Jude says. “That’s no wolf.”

“Coyote?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Bear?”

“Do they even howl?”

“We’ve got our pick of places to hole up in,” Abigail says, waving a hand around at the buildings lining the town square.

“Mmmm.” But he still sounds troubled.

Thirst sated and a modicum of cleanliness achieved, Abigail turns her attention to the wooden rectangles. They’re definitely doors, now that she’s looking at them and not thinking about getting a drink. Each of them is freestanding; she can walk entirely around them and not pass through any weird fucking void shit or anything like that.

“What’re you doing?” Jude’s got his shirt off now, wringing it out. Abigail takes a moment to admire his physique; even in the dark it’s evident that he works out. That could be handy if she gets too dizzy to punch her own cacti.

“They’re doors.”

“I thought they were just sculptures.”

“No.” It’s dark, but the writing on these is much clearer than that on the wayposts. “They’re for real doors. This one says **The Brother**.”

Jude side-eyes her. “Is that shit ‘cause I’m black?”

“No, dumbass. I think it’s literal.” Abigail walks around it again. There’s a handle only on the side with the writing. She jiggles it, but it seems to be locked. “Because of—you know, everything. Why you were in the apartments in the first place.”

Jude shakes his head and goes back to squeezing water out of his clothes.

Abigail examines the second door. **The Actress** is printed boldly across the pale weathered wood.

“It’s pretty obvious these were put here for us.”

“Check them for fingerprints.”

“What?”

“Big ones,” Jude clarifies. “If the same thing that was rebuilding the Tower put these here, I’d rather live off snake guts and well-water forever than go through it.”

“I cleaned all the guts out of the stupid thing,” Abigail says, but she checks the doors for any evidence that they were placed by some colossal invisible hand. There isn’t any. They look just like ordinary doors, save for the fact that they’re freestanding and also happen to have wording on them that’s incredibly relevant to the two of them.

Jude finally looks with her. “I guess,” he says slowly, and she knows he’s back to thinking about Jordan.

“It could just mean you wind up back at the apartments. It could mean you wind up back where you might be able to save him.”

“He _wasn’t_  my literal brother, he was just my friend.” But there’s longing in his voice, and he reaches out to touch the doorknob.

“Oh, it’s locked,” Abigail says, but Jude’s turning the knob and it moves easily. The door comes open a crack. Through it they can see a soft yellow light, like early sunrise, or like a dying bulb hanging in an old apartment hallway.

“He could have been my brother.”

“Then go find him and _make_ him your brother,” Abigail says. “And save him.”

“Come with me.” Jude catches her hand with his free hand and looks at her. “Whether it’s Jordan or the apartments or something else, it’s safer together.”

Abigail looks at the other door. “I don’t think it works that way,” she says softly, but he doesn’t appear to hear her.

Jude pulls the door all the way open; it grits unhappily on the sand but it’s possible to go through. “Come on!”

“Kiss for luck?” Abigail asks as lightly as possible.

“Sure.” Jude dips her, and her head spins all the more for that and for the warm kiss he plants on her and for knowing it’s the last one. “Now let’s go.”

She’s not sure how it will happen, only that it will happen. It turns out to be non-violent; one second their fingers are twined together and the next he’s just gone, disappearing into the mellow light.

Abigail touches her lips with her fingers, feeling his warmth rapidly fade from both. The cigarette packet hurtles out of the light and hits her in the stomach. Then the door slams shut. That’s all there is.

She walks to her own door.

Will this performance be back home, performing the role of dutiful daughter? Will it be bullshitting her way through job interviews, auditions, the conversation with the landlord? Will it be pretending that everything is fine while she and Selina try to keep the machine on?

“There’s no miles to this fucking door, I’m totally lacking any fuel, not even half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and—”

She can’t think of a way to finish it, so she just sticks a cigarette between her no longer painted lips, lights it, and steps through her door.


End file.
